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Weapons of Math Destruction Part 3

Here’s last week’s prompt for the Weapons of Math Destruction Book Club, I have chosen to ignore the provided questions, however. (Sorry, Bryan)

My big takeaway from these chapters is the importance of the decisions that are made about how to use data. Both predatory recruiting and nuisance policing seem to start with explicitly harmful (the former) or flawed (the latter) justifications. This makes the issue one of big data making it easier for people to do bad things.

The description of how the Chicago predictive policing initiative included social network analysis reminded me of the Social Credit system China is developing. (See this article from the Independent or this one from the Financial Times [warning:paywall]) Incidentally, the Independent article has a video and I was shown a pre-roll Lexus ad that was in Mandarin.

Unlike the Chicago system, where one’s core is known presumably only to police, the Chinese system, which includes in the “social credit score” algorithm your activity on social media and the scores of your friends, makes those scores public, encouraging you either to lean on your friends with low scores in an effort to improve their behavior or to shun them. Both approaches will improve the social component of your score. I wonder to what extent social credit scores are used in the Western world and we just don’t know about it yet.

NOTES AND QUOTES*

(96) Justice cannot just be something that one part of society inflicts upon the other.
(102) Part of the analysis that led police to McDaniel involved his social network.

*Yes, I’m aware that it should probably be Notes ans Quotations, but I will sacrifice grammatical accuracy for rhyme scheme

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